THE WAR IN THE DARK By Nick Setchfield

From SFX’s features editor Nick Setchfield comes a dazzlingly, genre-defying debut that fuses together thriller and speculative fantasy with historical fiction to create a page-turning adventure that reads like Neil Gaiman creating Indiana Jones.

Europe. 1963. And the true Cold War is fought on the borders of this world, at the edges of the light.

When the assassination of a traitor trading with the enemy goes terribly wrong, British Intelligence agent Christopher Winter must flee London. In a tense alliance with a lethal, mysterious woman named Karina Lazarova, he’s caught in a quest for hidden knowledge from centuries before, an occult secret written in a language of fire. A secret that will give supremacy to the nation that possesses it.

Racing against the Russians, the chase takes them from the demon-haunted Hungarian border to treasure-laden tunnels beneath Berlin, from an impossible house in Vienna to a bomb-blasted ruin in Bavaria where something unholy waits, born of the power of white fire and black glass . . .

It’s a world of treachery, blood, and magic. A world at war in the dark.

The War in the Dark is the start of a brand new series, a hyper-visual read that will delight fans of Ben Aaronovitch, Paul Cornell, and Susanna Clarke. At SFX Nick Setchfield has been a champion of the greats of the genre, in The War in Dark he shows he’s set to join them.

NICK SETCHFIELD is a writer and features editor for SFX, Britain’s best-selling magazine of genre entertainment in film, TV, and books. A regular contributing writer to Total Film, he’s also been a movie reviewer for the BBC and a scriptwriter for ITV’s Spitting Image. The War in the Dark is his first novel. He lives in Bath.